Bridges of Saint Petersburg

The two numbers, corrected

The hundred and one islands is a real figure attached to the wrong date. It describes the city at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the eighteenth-century canal-digging programme, and it was inflated even then by counting the buyany — small warehouse and loading plots later absorbed into larger islands. About twenty-five islands existed in the delta when the city was founded in 1703. The Russian state register of geographic names now lists 33 named islands within the city boundary, or something in the forties counting the Kronstadt archipelago. The fall is partly canals filled in and partly the old count having been padded.

The five hundred bridges appear to be invented. No dated figure, historical or current, supports it. What the city bridge authority publishes is a count of its own structures: roughly 770 engineering structures, of which about 430 are bridges, with 63 road overpasses, 45 tunnels and a hundred stretches of embankment, and 256 of them listed as cultural heritage. Counting park, industrial and suburban crossings maintained by others, the city total is around 800. Eighteen bridges have working opening mechanisms, of which twelve open during the navigation season.

So the honest version is more impressive than the round number it replaces, and it comes from the authority that maintains them.

The first bridge

Older accounts say the first bridge was built in 1703 and connected the Peter and Paul Fortress to the rest of the city. The date is right; the description is not, because in 1703 there was no city to connect it to.

What Peter ordered was a floating wooden bridge over the Kronverk Strait, linking Hare Island, where the fortress was going up, to the neighbouring island — later Petersburg Island and, from 1914, Petrogradsky. It was rebuilt on piles with two opening spans in 1706, rebuilt again in 1738 on the axis of the fortress gates, and renamed Ioannovsky in 1787 after those gates. The opening span was removed in a rebuild of 1950–51. It is now a seven-span footbridge of about seventy-five metres and a listed monument — the oldest bridge in the city by descent, if not by fabric.

The Anichkov bridge

Across the Fontanka on the line of Nevsky Prospekt. Older accounts date the first bridge to 1721; it was 1716, ordered the previous year and built by an engineering battalion under Mikhail Anichkov, who gave it his name. 1721 was the first rebuild, by the Dutch engineer Harman van Boles with Trezzini: eighteen spans and a hand-operated lifting section.

The present three-span granite-faced bridge dates from 1841, by the engineer I. F. Buttats with the architect Alexander Briullov, built in six months and opened that November — though much of what is seen today came from a further reconstruction in 1906–08, which kept the original brick arches. It is about fifty-five metres long and thirty-eight wide: wider than it is long, like several bridges here.

The four Horse Tamers are by Pyotr Klodt, and their sequence is untidy for a good reason. Two bronzes went up on the west side in November 1841, with plaster copies opposite; when the east bronzes finally arrived they were given away as diplomatic gifts — to Prussia in 1842 and Naples in 1846 — and plaster went back up. Klodt cast two new compositions, and the set was complete only in 1851.

In the war the groups came off their plinths in November 1941 and were buried in the garden of the Anichkov Palace — one in December, the rest not until May 1942, because the ground had frozen. They were dug out and reinstalled overnight on 1–2 June 1945. A bomb in November 1942 destroyed more than thirty metres of the cast-iron railing, recast and replaced in 1944; a shell scar on one pedestal was deliberately left and marked with a plaque in 1972.

The Lomonosov bridge, and the seven on the Fontanka

Older accounts describe this bridge as having a "present design from 1912" and being part of a seven-bridge project. The seven is right; 1912 is not a design but a reconstruction.

Seven identical three-span stone bridges were built to one model across the Fontanka between 1785 and 1788: Simeonovsky (now Belinsky), Anichkov, Chernyshev (now Lomonosov), Semyonovsky, Obukhovsky, Izmailovsky and Staro-Kalinkin. Each had four granite towers with domed caps, which housed the hand gear for a central drawspan. The model design is often credited to the French engineer Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, with Felten and Bazhenov involved, but the attribution is genuinely unsettled and several other names appear in the record; the author is not formally established.

Only two keep the towered form — Lomonosov and Staro-Kalinkin — and since Staro-Kalinkin was heavily rebuilt around 1900, Lomonosov is the best-preserved of the series. Its central span was made fixed in 1859, after which the towers became purely decorative. The 1912–13 work strengthened the piers and vaults and replaced the wooden centre span with metal beams. The granite obelisk lamps with their sea-horse sculptures, which are half of the bridge's look, were added in 1915 — later than the structure and later than the reconstruction. It was renamed after Lomonosov in 1948.

The chain bridges of the 1820s

Seven chain suspension bridges were built in the city between 1822 and 1827. Three survive, and only one of them still works as a chain suspension bridge. That is the fact to carry away, and older accounts do not have it.

• The Bank Bridge, over the Griboyedov Canal, built 1825–26 and opened in July 1826 — engineer Wilhelm von Traitteur with V. A. Khristianovich. It is 1.85 metres wide between its railings and about twenty long, and it takes its name from the State Assignation Bank opposite, now a university. The four figures on it are routinely called griffins; they are winged lions, cast iron, with copper wings covered in gold leaf. The bridge was closed for a long restoration — the sculptures came off in January 2017 and returned in May 2019, the bridge reopening that June. The bodies came back in a dark patinated tone and the wings are gilded.
• The Lion Bridge, also over the Griboyedov Canal, is its pair: same engineer, same years, 1825–26, with four cast-iron lions modelled by the same sculptor, Pavel Sokolov. Its original railings were replaced in the 1880s and the present appearance restored in 1954.
• The Pochtamtsky Bridge, over the Moika, begun in September 1823 and open to pedestrians in August 1824, by Traitteur again. It is the one that still carries its load on its chains. The Bank and Lion bridges now work structurally as beam bridges, their chains decorative. A chain link fractured in 2001 and the chains were replaced half as thick again in a 2003 overhaul.

The Egyptian bridge, and a collapse that is taught wrongly

Older accounts say the Egyptian Bridge was "designed 150 years ago by the same engineer, P. Sokolov". Three things are wrong in one clause. Sokolov was the sculptor, not the engineer — the engineers were Traitteur and Khristianovich — and the bridge was built in 1825–26, which is two hundred years ago, not a hundred and fifty. It crosses the Fontanka on the line of Lermontovsky Prospekt.

On 20 January 1905 a squadron of guards cavalry crossed it — some fifty-six horsemen, eleven sleighs and a number of people on foot — and the chain bridge came down. Nobody was killed; three horses died. A city commission attributed the failure to poor-quality iron, and specifically to an internal cavity in one chain link, after a long period without a major overhaul.

The collapse is used in physics teaching as a textbook case of resonance from marching cavalry. That explanation is folklore rather than a finding. The engineering record points at the metal; the 1905 press suggested only that the movement of horses on an already unsound structure contributed. It is a better story told as a case of a myth outliving the investigation that disproved it.

A temporary wooden bridge served from April 1905 until 1956. The present single-span steel frame was commissioned in December 1955, load-tested with four tracked vehicles of forty-three tonnes each. The sphinxes are the originals of 1826, not copies in the original style as older accounts have it: the abutments and sculptures were what survived the collapse, and the same figures stand on the new bridge. They have been repaired after wartime bombing, after a collision in 1989, and twice in the 2000s; they were taken away for restoration again and reinstalled in late September 2026, the work having overrun after further damage from vandalism and from people climbing them.

The Blue bridge, wider than it is long

Here older accounts are essentially right, which is worth saying. The Blue Bridge over the Moika is 97.3 metres wide and only about thirty long. It was rebuilt as a single cast-iron arch in 1818, forty-one metres wide, to a design by Wilhelm Heste, and widened to its present dimension in 1842–43 when the Mariinsky Palace was built and St Isaac's Square laid out. A wooden drawbridge preceded it, named "Blue" in 1738 after the colour it was painted.

The effect is that it does not read as a bridge at all. Russian sources call it a most-ploshchad — a bridge-square — and treat it as part of the St Isaac's Square ensemble, which is how almost everyone crosses it without noticing. A width of 99.9 metres circulates and is a myth; the claim that it is the widest bridge in the world cannot be substantiated.

On its descent to the water stands a granite flood gauge topped with Neptune's trident, put up in 1971, marked with the highest recorded flood levels: 1824, 1903, 1924, 1955 and 1967.

The Palace bridge, and the openings

Older accounts describe the Palace Bridge as running "from Vasilevsky Island to University Embankment", which names the same bank twice — University Embankment is on Vasilyevsky Island. It runs from Admiralty Island beside the Winter Palace to Birzhevaya Square on Vasilyevsky Island, where that embankment begins.

A pontoon crossing stood here from 1856. The permanent bridge was built 1912–16 and opened in December 1916 with its decoration unfinished because of the war; the engineer was A. P. Pshenitsky, the architect R.-F. Meltzer. The cast-iron railings were not added until 1939, which is why a bridge of 1916 looks of a piece with the embankments. It is about 253 metres long and 31 wide, in five spans, with a central two-leaf bascule of some 56 metres, each leaf balanced by seven counterweights; the mechanism was replaced with hydraulics in a capital repair of 2012–13.

Older accounts advise going early to watch the spans rise for the morning river traffic. The bridges open at night, not in the morning — in the small hours, twice, with a closed interval between, during a navigation season that runs from about April to the end of November. The schedule is published for each season and the times shift from year to year with vessel traffic and weather, so it is not a thing to print; the bridge authority publishes it annually. In 2025 the bascules were raised more than two thousand times.

The Trinity bridge, and the competition Eiffel won

Older accounts say the Trinity Bridge was completed in 1903 and leave it there. The competition behind it is better than the bridge.

In 1892 the city held an open competition and received sixteen entries from Russia, France, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Hungary and Spain. Gustave Eiffel's firm took first prize with a design entered under the motto "Minor", and the city bought its second design as well. Nothing was built. The commission could not settle on a scheme, and the French Société de Construction des Batignolles, whose lighter and cheaper cantilever-arch proposal the city preferred, would not sell the design because it wanted to build the bridge itself.

So a second competition was held in 1896, this time requiring the winner to be the builder, and Batignolles won it. The bridge was built between 1897 and 1903, with Nicholas II and the French president at the foundation ceremony, and opened in May 1903 for the city's bicentenary. Eiffel's firm won the first competition outright and lost the one that counted.

It is 582 metres long in ten spans, in the style moderne, and its decoration is not the "carved obelisks" of older accounts but granite pylons and obelisks carrying bronze ship rostra, double-headed eagles and imperial monograms, with sixteen large and twenty-four small candelabra. Much of that was stripped in 1936 and restored in 2001–02. Its names track the century: Troitsky from 1903, the Bridge of Equality from October 1918, Kirovsky from 1934, and Troitsky again from October 1991.

Four more worth knowing

• The Liteyny Bridge, 1875–79, by Amand Struve after an international competition — nearly four hundred metres in six spans, and the first bridge in the city to be electrically lit, in 1879. It was the Alexander II Bridge from 1903 to 1917. It was not, as is sometimes said, the first permanent bridge over the Neva; that was the Blagoveshchensky of 1850.
• The Bolsheokhtinsky Bridge, 1909–11, whose competition of 1901 drew sixteen entries and chose none of them: the built design came from outside the competition, under the motto "Freedom of navigation", by the engineer G. G. Krivoshein with the architect V. P. Apyshkov. Its two lighthouse-like towers house the machinery for a forty-eight-metre bascule.
• The Hermitage Bridge over the Winter Canal was the first stone bridge in the city, built 1762–66 as part of the granite Palace Embankment — but its stone vault was dismantled in 1934 and replaced in reinforced concrete, with only the appearance kept.
• The Prachechny Bridge of 1766–69, where the Fontanka leaves the Neva by the Summer Garden, still has its original three-span stone arches, essentially unaltered. Between the two, it is the older fabric, and neither is safely called the oldest surviving stone bridge.